Fate of the Faithful is a five-part crossover in which the heroes of the Coriander Society leap through a tear in reality and land in The Void. John Carmichael and Asena were seconds from finishing their old enemy Ralzamon when a hand reached through the dark and took him. They followed him into a world of hanging cities, dead titans and a fortress shaped like an orc skull. There they found Lyrus, son of Orin, leading a band of oath-breakers who fight for the Grandmaster from the shadows. The arc is a heist, a manhunt and a buddy comedy rolled into one. It is also the story that exposes how The Arbiter has been quietly building his army out of fallen champions.
Background
In the universe of Yord, John Carmichael (played by NinjaManMat1) and Asena (played by PodsofWar) had spent a long time hunting Ralzamon, “Master of the Unknown.” He was the psychic persona of Josiah Parsons, a man from Asena’s past who had been on her family’s ill-fated expedition to the jungle. They finally cornered his psychic shade in the Chamber of Crystal and Bubbling Tar. Then “a gateway ripped open behind Ralzamon’s psychic shade. A hand reached through, said, I still have need of you, and dragged him into the void.” John, Asena and the wizened scholar Lawrence Booker Green leapt in after him.
Asena had been to the Void before, though she didn’t know it. She had fought Ralzamon as a champion in the kitchen of The Dread Fortress, where he proved to have “a distinct lack of tolerance for milk.” Afterward she was sent home with only dreams of roaring crowds, which John had always waved away.
In the Void itself, Lyrus (played by Mudcat) carries a grudge of his own. The Arbiter once saved his father Orin as a child, after Orin’s village was burned. Later the Arbiter murdered him. When Orin’s death and the Arbiter’s treachery came to light, many of the soldiers who had served under Orin at The Eastern Outpost deserted. They formed the Faithful, a resistance working in the Grandmaster’s favor while she remained unaware of the plot.
The Story
Part 1: The Hanging City
Coriander Society, Fate of the Faithful Part 1 (A Crossover) dropped the heroes onto a bridge in Prexmarin, the Hanging City. Its districts dangle from colossal chains that rise into an impossible distance, with golden towers on top and ramshackle hovels clinging underneath like stalactites. Lawrence arrived without his shoes, which had stayed behind in Yord. Within minutes a riot broke out in the market. Hulking, purple-grey brutes in scraps of gold-and-turquoise armor were smashing stalls in the name of the Grandmaster. Their leader was Hathim, a power-armored blood berserker of Tiamat whom John recognized from an old case.
Asena did what she always does. She ran straight at them and asked whether anyone had seen Ralzamon. Every gold-wearing head in the square turned toward her, and then everyone attacked her.
Help arrived from the south. A white-furred werebear in grey plate charged in at the head of a ragtag militia, wielding two black swords that drank the light and opened singularities in whoever they cut. When John flagged him down (“this guy’s attacking just young girls in the street”), Lyrus replied, “Give me just a minute,” and slaughtered his way over. The brawl that followed was gloriously unhinged. John prayed aloud to Tiamat and wrapped Asena in crackling armor that fried Hathim. He was levitated forty feet into the air by flying knights, so he scattered a bed of inflatable life rafts across the courtyard and hauled himself down with a cartoon anchor. Lyrus opened portals so that enemies’ own weapons came out somewhere unhelpful. He then cut a portal to let John shoot through it, and dove head-first through another to fall on a fleeing knight from the sky. Throughout the fight a crushing psychic presence prodded at everyone’s insecurities. Asena recognized it as Ralzamon, stronger than ever. Lyrus ended Hathim by pushing both arms through a portal, beheading him from behind and leaving only the head rolling across the cobbles.
Afterward came introductions.
Lyrus: “I am Lyrus, son of Orin, servant of the Grandmaster.”
Lyrus explained that the rioters were “charlatans, all of them.” They were the Arbiter’s agents dressed as the Grandmaster’s troops to sow unrest before his coup, and Ralzamon was now the Arbiter’s general. Hearing “the Grandmaster” made Asena’s half-remembered dreams of the arena snap into focus. John finally realized that the stories she told when they woke had been true all along. He still refused to accept the “non-denominational corporate holiday,” though. Lyrus pointed out the Dread Fortress, a towering orc skull in a lava field that sits on the horizon whichever way you look. Then he sliced open a cold, jagged portal. When Asena tried to widen it, it began to unravel like bad cloth. He took them to the Faithful’s headquarters, a blacksmith’s shop in a nondescript castle ward. Before going in, John and Asena bought every wooden spoon a small boy was selling, thousands of them. Inside they met Frank the orc cook, whose food Lyrus warned them never to eat. They also met Baptiste, a silver-haired elf who only stabs and flirts and doesn’t always tell the two apart, and an old blind dragonborn.
Part 2: The Seer and the Spy
Coriander Society - Fate of the Faithful Part 2 (A Crossover) opened with a bad night’s sleep on the Faithful’s workshop floor. John etched a magic-missile rune into Lyrus’s palm as thanks, and Lyrus grumbled that his father would call it cheating. Morning brought a blessing from Doug the Pug, the Grandmaster’s cyborg zombie pug, who declared it “a bones day.” It also brought Frank’s stew, made of beans, market meat, pineapple and strips of tanned leather “for their nutritional value.” Asena loved it. Lyrus, dead inside, went back for seconds.
The blind dragonborn turned out to be The Seer, a blacksmith with a gift for seeing what was and what will be. He insulted John’s sentient revolver Krontaka, which pulsed with indignation. He sensed dragon nature in Asena, “though not one from this plane.” He told John he would face a choice between what he wants and his honor. Lyrus gave in to his own reading and got the bleakest one: “You will fight. And you will fight again and again. Until you are amongst the sand.” Asena concluded he should avoid sand.
The Faithful’s spy, Kenny, had gone quiet. Lyrus described him as “a small goblin, kind of a gambler,” who “gambles, but not well.” The Faithful’s plans had lately been leaking to the Children of the Void at exactly the moment Ralzamon arrived. Working the rain-soaked alleys in a string of disguises, John learned that Kenny was pinned down in a safe house. Kenny had been hunting a magical silver ewer lost in The Tumult, a region formed from the body of a dead titan. Poured out, the ewer opens a curtain into the Ethereal Plane, letting a strike team walk through walls. John also worked out that there was no mole at all: “it’s just Ralzamon being Ralzamon.” Lyrus, meanwhile, showed Asena his hand-drawn maps. He had once hoped to be a cartographer, but his father said he was going to war. He pointed out the Eastern Outpost, where Orin had guarded The Box of Chaos for many years.
When John tried to borrow the Seer’s own silver ewer, he discovered it was a replica, built for a swap. Reaching for his lost wizard’s sight, John found his and the Seer’s eyes swirling into a shared vision, and Asena was dragged in through her bond with Ralzamon. They saw the Arbiter on an icy throne: winged, black-haired, wearing eight colored rings. He reached into time and space “like buttering toast” and fused a resurrected Josiah Parsons with the dying wisp of Ralzamon fresh from his defeat in Yord. The blast cracked his whole ice throne room.
The Arbiter: “As I told you before, you will act as my general… And when the void is mine, when we’ve gotten rid of the Grandmaster, then your desires will be my desires… But know this, if you fail me, I will destroy you.”
The new Ralzamon’s mind swept across the Void, and then it turned and looked straight at John and Asena. Asena summed it up: “He knows we’re here.” The team put their hands in, and so did Baptiste, the Seer, John’s cat Chester, and Slakura, Asena’s little pink slime friend. Then they went into the seedy lower districts to find Kenny. John disguised himself as the goblin and hustled a gambling den until he learned the safe house’s password: order a drink poured out of a boot. That was when the kill team found them. It was Circe, self-proclaimed “master of Magitek, the most nefarious inventor in the city of Beacon,” and Ganyu Sinmal, an armored titan with a furnace grate bolted over its mouth, whom John and Asena knew from an earlier world. In the fight that broke out, John’s fireball exploded every ninja in the district but left Circe’s elementally immune blouse spotless. Circe shrank Asena to the size of a cat. Lyrus challenged Ganyu to single combat (“We must feed.” “Oh, I could eat.”), and Asena’s dimension-hopping sent a flare through reality that something out there noticed.
Part 3: Heist in the Tumult
Coriander Society - Fate of The Faithful Part 3 — A Crossover picked up mid-brawl with everyone in a different genre. Tiny Asena tripped in Slakura’s slime trail, had Slakura turn into a key, and slid into a bank vault stuffed with a life-changing fortune she couldn’t lift. Ganyu Sinmal leapt ten times its normal distance with Lyrus in its grip and power-bombed him back to the ground. Lyrus then drew the void out of his swords into his own body, black flames pouring off him, and went “even further beyond.” When Ganyu began to crack, Ralzamon seized its body directly, its eyes turning ghostly blue. In the same moment he tried to fry Circe’s brain for disloyalty, and John threw his shield over her. Below the city, something huge and chained woke up and began lashing tentacles at the districts. Lyrus misty-stepped into Ganyu’s furnace mouth and stabbed the creature fused inside it through the brain. As the body toppled into the abyss, Kenny burst from hiding and glued himself to Lyrus’s boot with sovereign glue to save him. Lyrus: “So what’s the second part of the plan then?” Kenny: “I thought you would know.”
John’s speech to Circe (Ralzamon was “master of absolutely jack crap”) won her over on the condition that they protect her and get her off-world. John fed Asena a can of enchanted spinach to restore her size, and then Circe’s grow ray overshot and made her enormous. They robbed the bank together, and Asena kept a drawing of “a dead purple rock land man.” The Beast Below snapped its chains and began tearing Prexmarin apart. Kenny led them to a waygate keyed to a flipped copper coin, “from one crappy alley to another,” and they escaped. Lyrus survived only by climbing out of his father’s boot and leaving it glued to Kenny’s hand.
Back at headquarters, Circe explained that she had joined the Arbiter to boost her supervillain career and only then learned it was “kind of a for life thing.” Deserters are hunted “across all possible realities.” Lawrence healed Lyrus badly, then furiously, and revealed that the titan’s blood could dissolve the glue. Asena’s drawing turned out to be a map of the Tumult. The party swam up a river of glowing titan blood that made their hearts race and compelled John to sing everything; Lyrus contributed “We’re no strangers to love.” At the bloodfalls, Asena touched an enormous glowing plant that unfurled to reveal the silver ewer. Someone began cutting through the far door with a blowtorch, so John swapped in the Seer’s replica, poured the real ewer, and pulled everyone into the Ethereal. A flash of visions came through: a red moon over a bloody city, murder over and over, something dripping blood. From the grey fog they watched the newcomers arrive. There were Lacunian power-armored mercenaries, a candle-waxed, winged thing that was no longer human, and a red-bearded priest in broken shackles who lifted the fake and declared, “The master will be pleased, and our empire will rise again.”
Part 4: Into the Shadowlands
Coriander Society — Fate of the Faithful Part 4 (A Crossover) turned to the question of getting home. Lawrence’s theory was that the Void has no real astral highway, only scraps of planes that worlds brought with them. He believed Ralzamon was two echoes of one man fused together, and that the half belonging to Yord could be their anchor back. Lyrus added a grim piece of the picture. The Arbiter both chooses the champions and disposes of the losers, and Lawrence suspected he had been harvesting fallen champions for the army Lyrus knew he was amassing.
Using a chalice from an occult chamber and a 1930s photograph of Asena’s family expedition, Josiah Parsons included, Lawrence and the Seer divined Ralzamon’s location. Lawrence came out bleeding from the ear; the Seer couldn’t see what the fuss was about. Ralzamon was in The Shadowlands, once the realm of The Shadow King. He was hiding in a floating keep near a great dark spire whose shadow, cast by the light of the Dread Fortress, stretches everywhere “as if the Dread Fortress was the sun, the spire was the sundial.” John delivered King Théoden’s speech from atop Lyrus’s shoulders, falling off repeatedly. The Seer handed over a rainbow-sheened knife for Chester. Asena cut her palm and gave Lawrence a few drops of blood as a tracking anchor. Lyrus, after confessing he’s “actually a Goliath. Just happen to be a werebear as well,” cut a blind portal into the howling dark.
The Shadowlands got into everyone’s heads. Lyrus saw his father’s bones as the foundation of the whole fortress and growled, “Get out of my head.” Asena saw Josiah Parsons at the gate and heard a voice say “He cannot know.” At the keep, Goblins in chef’s hats squabbled over scraps until a wall gun disintegrated one, “molecule by molecule.” John tested it with an illusory goblin, concluding the test of “the Goblin Disintegration System.” Then the infiltration went off the rails in stages. The party shrank to cat size to slip through the gate, went invisible, and got stuck in portcullises. Circe enlarged Lyrus into a living bridge (“Careful, that tickles”). A many-eyed mind witness grabbed John’s decoy modron Weebo and dropped it into the abyss. Lyrus finally came face to face with the keep’s lord, a Draconic Death Knight, and tried “We were sent by the Arbiter to check on the, you know, the thing about the thing.” It didn’t work.
Lyrus fastball-specialed tiny John across the keep. John sprouted tattooed dragon wings and terrified the garrison, while Lyrus fought the Death Knight in a duel nobody could interrupt. Asena dropped onto a mercenary “like the squirrel from National Lampoon’s Christmas movie” and punched him until he walked off a ledge and splattered on the ground below. Lyrus, flush with gold and fury, finally cut the Death Knight down. Its dying soul flared into a ball of green-and-black hellfire, hurled itself at him, and exploded across the courtyard, cooking the skeletons into glass. The episode ended with the giant werebear engulfed in the blast and Asena protesting, “This isn’t even the fight!”
Part 5: Half of Ralzamon
In Coriander Society — Fate of the Faithful Part 5 (A Crossover), Circe froze the fallen Lyrus in a block of ice to keep him alive and promised to “get a full report from you later.” John absorbed a priest’s fireball into an offering to Tiamat. He then gunned down the red-bearded Aulus the Kindler and taunted the hiding Ralzamon out. Ralzamon rose from the pit inside his giant psychic visage. Below him, burning yellow eyes watched from the depths, held by black chains. Lyrus, thinking of the Arbiter and his father’s legacy (“no, no, there’s more to do!”), burst out of the ice and charged.
Ralzamon tried to rattle John by wearing the face of his beloved Carmen. John answered by throwing Asena at him and later declared, “You’ve become that which you hate, Parson, and I’m going to destroy you.” Asena cursed him “directly in the face, right in the teeth.” Lyrus, remembering the healing potion Kenny slipped him before they left, punched a Lacunian mecha with thunder gauntlets the machine was never built to withstand. Then John’s barrage of magic-missile bullets shattered the psychic visage “like bullets through a windshield,” tearing the Yord echo away for good.
What was left, dangling in Asena’s grip over the pit, was simply Josiah Parsons. “If you kill me, he’ll look for you,” he told her: the one who binds him. He begged to “die alone and leave it out of his sight” so the Arbiter’s attention would stay off Yord. He also admitted that the things he had seen were far worse than anything she might be. Asena didn’t really get it, but she let him fall.
The thing in the pit hauled itself out, enormous and horned, with hands that bent the wrong way. The surviving mercenary called it “suboptimal” and had his lifeblood drained by vampiric kobolds. Asena’s malfunctioning laser dumped its whole core and dropped a tower on a mecha. Lyrus tried John’s gift revolver once, firing it point blank into Vargas and splattering wax and blood everywhere, decided “I don’t like this,” and threw it away. Circe froze the candle-headed Scorched Adjudicator Vargas, and Lyrus teleported the ice block to land at the monster’s feet. Then Circe turned the monster into a chicken, “Eh, screw it,” and followed the others through the ewer’s mist into the Ethereal.
Aftermath
Back at the hideout, Asena reported that “we killed half of Ralzamon.” John believed the broken Josiah would now work against the Arbiter in his own way, and Lyrus accepted it: “the enemy of my enemy.” The Seer’s sight had cleared, and he admitted he may have been wrong about John’s gun. Lyrus took the ewer for the Faithful, saying the important thing was that the Arbiter didn’t have it. John quietly swapped it for the replica and kept the real one. He then handed out farewell gifts. Kenny got a ninja disguise, Baptiste a very personal knife (“John Carmichael, all of my stabbings are personal.” “I know.”), and Lyrus a healing potion. Frank got a vial of acid, which he drank, belched, and pronounced “pretty good.” Lyrus gave John 400 electrum and wished him “a happy retirement before you fall on the field of battle.” Circe left for the first lightning rail out, as far from the Arbiter as possible. Lawrence, using the torn collar of Josiah’s expedition shirt and a tuning fork tuned to Yord, held two realities in tension. John, Asena, Lawrence and Chester were pulled home by Asena’s own memories to the Crystalline Cavern. Kenny watched them fade: “I didn’t really like those guys.”
The Faithful are left stronger and hopeful. Kenny has new information, and a skilled band of fighters is due back any day to push toward the Grandmaster. In the final scene, the Arbiter sits on his throne of ice, a twisted echo of the Grand Throne, and catches a frozen glimpse of the departing heroes. Among them is perhaps one face he selected himself. Ralzamon, now merely the man who lost to Asena in the arena, stands before him in disgrace. When Ralzamon protests that it was no duel of honor, the Arbiter isn’t interested:
The Arbiter: “Honor doesn’t exist… I could kill you now, sure. But the next phase of my plan has begun. You’ve served your purpose. And at this point, it would be just kind of sad. Like stomping on an ant.”
Episodes
- Coriander Society, Fate of the Faithful Part 1 (A Crossover)
- Coriander Society - Fate of the Faithful Part 2 (A Crossover)
- Coriander Society - Fate of The Faithful Part 3 — A Crossover
- Coriander Society — Fate of the Faithful Part 4 (A Crossover)
- Coriander Society — Fate of the Faithful Part 5 (A Crossover)